Using Mathematica or WebMathematica to develop interactive, crowdsourced timeline visualizations

I aim to develop a series of timeline ZUI visualizations which will display a set of events similar to Wolfram’s own Timeline of Computable Knowledge, but that can also handle crowdsourced uploading of events (and hyperlink to, say Wikipedia articles).

In addition, I would like the layout to look more like the printed poster version of the Wolfram timeline (shown at the bottom of the page), which means developing a layout engine so that labels don’t overlap.

Could this project be developed as a CDF? With WebMathematica? Any pointers to documentation, tutorials or identification of other technologies (such as databases) to this end are appreciated.

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ZUI == zoomable user interface?
– Brett Champion
May 6 ’12 at 2:53

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1 Answer
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Since it appears that you wish to use live input for your Timeline, webMathematica will be the best solution. CDF cannot accept anything but input from what is in the file itself.

Documentation can be found here: http://www.wolfram.com/products/webmathematica/

User Guide is located here: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/webMathematica/tutorial/Overview.html